[juneau-lug] Fun *tab tricks

Things you will probably never want to do to your workstation:

Edit fstab:

For example if your root partition is on /dev/sda1, change the entry to point 
to /dev/hda1.  Or vice versa.

Reboot.

It works!

Just remember to change it back before you try to build an initrd image, or 
you will get a kernel panic on boot when the initrd tries to load a 
non-existant disk.  Also, if you change any other partition, it simply won't 
be mounted at boot.  Only works for /

Lock mtab:

chattr +i /etc/mtab

Now you can mount your root partition, but any other partitions will fail.  
Or, in one case I saw, a power outage and resulting file corruption locked 
the file.  Deleting the locked mtab and touching it allowed a mount -a to 
work.

Fun!
------------------------------------
The Juneau Linux Users Group -- http://www.juneau-lug.org
This is the Juneau-LUG mailing list.
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to juneau-lug-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the 
word unsubscribe in the subject header.

Other related posts: